


Alone In Time

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2017 [5]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, When Calls the Heart (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death, Stargate Continuum - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:23:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9284237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate Multiverse, Any, Time travel is not nearly as much fun as it was portrayed to be."Evan Lorne is sent back in time on a mission for Stargate Command. It's lonely as hell.





	

Evan had not expected time travel to be so lonely. He’d heard about SG-1’s stint time-traveling, in which they’d gone as a team. Colonel Sheppard had been sent far into the future. He’d been the last man alive, but he’d had the ghost of Rodney McKay to guide him, protect him, and send him home. He should’ve been prepared for the worst when General O’Neill called him into his office and said,

“I have a job just for you.”

Those were the same words that had landed Evan in the Stargate Program as a surveyor on SG-11.

They were the same words that had landed Evan on _The Daedalus_ and headed for the Pegasus Galaxy as John Sheppard’s new 2IC even though at least a dozen other field-grade officers had general and SGC seniority over him.

They were the words that had sent him back to Coal Valley, Canada, in 1910, nineteen years before the Stargate would first be discovered.

He was to go alone, unarmed, with nothing but the clothes on his back - painstakingly recreated to match the fashions of the period - and a journal detailing the actions he had to undertake to ensure Earth’s defense after the attack by the Super Hive.

The plan was insane. It would have made so much more sense to send McKay or Zelenka or someone else back to do it, but they were needed in the present, and Evan, as good a 2IC as he’d been, was expendable in a way they weren’t.

Plus he had the Gene, stronger than McKay had it (Zelenka didn’t have it at all). He’d need it, to complete his task.

To build a second chair.

Not just build it, but bury it, preserve it, and ensure its location would be delivered at the right place at the right time.

Atlantis had defeated the Super-Hive, but not before it had taken out the Chair.

And not before it had disseminated the coordinates to Earth - and instructions on how to make more super hives.

This was a Hail Mary pass. If Evan failed, well, the present he’d left wouldn’t change. It would just march to its bitter end, over and over again till some incarnation of him got it right. He’d never see it, though. Not the end, and not the new future he’d make. He would grow old here, and he would die here.

Whoever had cooked up this insane scheme had done ridiculous amounts of research. Naquadah deposits here on Earth. All the political and cultural events Evan needed to be aware of. Even a life for him to step into. He’d spent months preparing for the mission, reading the books a man of his age and education and station ought to have read, listening to the music, learning the dances. Learning the thousand and one ways to interact appropriately with strangers.

Leland Coulter was a wealthy man, a timber magnate who opened a sawmill in Coal Valley, right before it was renamed Hope Valley. Conveniently for Evan, by 1910 his immediate family was all gone, and he was on his own.

Even more conveniently for Evan, Evan looked just like him.

Evan had done a lot of dubious things for the Air Force, for the SGC. He’d never taken a human life in cold blood.

Seeing his own face, pale and lifeless, was something he would never forget.

But he had orders, and he had a mission, so he buried Leland Coulter’s body and stepped into his shoes.

When he roared into town on that motorcycle, for a moment he could forget where he was and what he was doing, because it was a fantastic machine. It was almost like flying. But then the woman in the long dress - Rosemary LeVeaux - smiled at him, and it was time for him to assume his new role.

Leland Coulter wasn’t much different from Evan himself - was laid back, friendly, good at making friends and connections, getting the lay of the land, engineering situations to his advantage. But Evan wasn’t Leland.

Leland wasn’t an artist, for starters; that belonged to the young Mountie, Jack Thornton. Leland wasn’t a soldier, either, though Evan would have been insane to go about unarmed. Leland knew nothing of the solar system, the stars, outer space, but of an evening he liked taking a stroll with a young lady and looking up at the sky.

The stars in Hope Valley were amazing. Evan had only ever seen them as bright and vivid on planets that were basically uninhabited by humans. He always, always looked for Pegasus.

Some days Evan thought he was going mad. He woke in the morning, and he didn’t go running or train. He stared at the man in the mirror as he shaved with a straight razor and knotted his tie very carefully, and he didn’t know who he was. Major Evan Lorne of Stargate Command. Leland Coulter of Hope Valley.

It was exhausting, day in and day out, pretending. He had to live Leland’s life, befriend his friends, distance his enemies, run his company. He had the journal to direct him so as to maintain Leland’s business success, because he needed money, to find and mine the naquadah, to order the appropriate tools.

He had to build the Chair himself.

It was the only time he felt like himself, alive, present. He tugged on his old BDUs as his overalls and set to work in the workshop behind his house, the workshop no one was allowed to enter. He’d allowed himself a single indulgence that he’d told no one of - and almost no one had been told of his mission, lest someone attempt to sabotage it. He had an iPod, a solar charger, and a set of headphones, so he could listen to his own music while he worked.

It was what kept him sane. If any of the three ever broke, he’d be without the music he loved (not so, once he figured out how to splice a victrola into the thing, years down the road).

When Evan was on his own, he worked on the Chair, he drew, and he sang. He wasn’t, by nature, a good singer, and as he had no audience he had no one to correct or criticise him, but he had a fine memory. It was what made him a good 2IC, what made him effective for this mission.

That’s what it was, a mission.

The job, the house, the town, the friends. It was all a mission.

His true purpose was the Chair. But he had to maintain everything else. Everything else ensured he would have the means and supplies to build the Chair and the new outpost to go with it. So he smiled, and he felt alone. He played cards and had drinks, and he felt alone. He went to dances and sang in church and rolled up his sleeves to work at the sawmill, and he felt alone.

He kissed Rosemary LeVeaux, and he felt so, so alone.

When finally the Chair was complete, he found the coordinates marked in the journal for the new outpost, and he set to building that.

Eighteen years into his mission, in the middle of the night, he completed his work. He sealed up the Chair outpost and left it marked with his own tombstone, because he still had a sense of humor.

The Chair was done. The Outpost was done. His mission was done.

He had no way home, because home as he knew it no longer existed.

He recorded the Chair’s coordinates in the journal, on the very last page, and then he sealed up the book and sent it to Leland Coulter’s attorney, to be handed down through the ranks of the law firm and lawyers and successors till it reached its rightful owner in the right year.

And then he walked away from Hope Valley.

He shed his fancy clothes, pulled on his old uniform, took his gun and his sketchbook and his pack and departed into the night. He left everything to Jack and Elizabeth Thornton, knew they’d use it well, for the benefit of the town.

Evan had had to travel, to maintain the timber business, to keep it growing, to carefully shore up its resources against the Great Depression so that the business - and its assets, like his journal - were never lost to the ravages of time.

He was in New York when he received news of the sinking of the Titanic.

He was in Denver when he heard of the outbreak of the Great War in Europe.

He was in Egypt when the Stargate was unearthed.

He was in California when the stock market crashed.

And he was in Boston when the _Achilles_ arrived in the harbor with the Stargate on board.

Evan stood wearing an old sailor’s pea coat, unrecognizable beneath a heavy beard and a fisherman’s cap, with his hands in his pockets, his worldly possessions in the satchel at his hip, and watched the ship pull into the dock. The _Achilles_ wasn’t a ship of any note, and hardly anyone else noted its coming, no one but the dock master, the dock workers, and a man in a suit and his teenage daughter.

Catherine Langford and her father, Evan realized.

He was tempted to speak to them, but - no.

The Stargate had arrived. That would be enough. He could continue roaming the world, seeing all the places he’d dreamed of seeing. As many as he could see before the next World War broke out, at any rate.

Evan turned to go, and then he heard a familiar voice call out, “Mr. Langford!”

He turned, eyes wide, and saw one of the sailors, wearing a dark homespun sweater and trousers, heading toward the man and his daughter. Dock workers were wrangling the massive wooden box that contained the Stargate onto a truck.

“I just need your John Hancock right here, sir.”

Evan would know that voice anywhere. Cameron Mitchell, the leader of SG-1. But that was impossible. It was probably just a doppelganger, just as Leland Coulter had been for Evan.

Evan started toward the gang plank to get a better look at the man. The sailor looked like Mitchell all right, maybe a few years older. Beards always made men look older than they were. He had Mitchell’s blue eyes and straight nose (but for where it had been broken once).

No, that was just the nostalgia talking. It had been decades since Evan had seen anyone he knew from his real life. Even though he drew them all obsessively - Sheppard, Parrish, McKay, Weir, Carter, Jackson, Teyla, Ronon, Zelenka, Beckett, Woolsey - he was pretty sure he was forgetting what they looked like, what they sounded like. Evan’s solitude had finally done him in. It was time to get himself put down, like the mad dog that he was.

Mission accomplished. No more use for this old soldier.

Still a soldier, though, at heart. He wasn’t about to roll over and play dead. So he hung around the dock and he watched the _Achilles_ get unloaded. The more he watched that one sailor, the more he was convinced that the man was Cameron Mitchell.

What sealed the deal was when the captain finally dismissed the crew for some shore leave and the sailor said, “You know what would really hit the spot? Some of my grandma’s homemade macaroons.”

“You going to visit her?” another sailor asked.

“Ah - no. She’s no longer with me, God rest her soul. I guess I’ll have to settle for a beer before I find a place to lay my head.”

Evan followed the sailors to one of the dockside bars, careful to keep his distance. After abandoning Leland Coulter’s life he’d returned to the life he knew, training and soldiering, acting as a bodyguard here and there to earn money, otherwise traveling and seeing the world, seeing the greatest artists of the generation, artists he’d only read about as a student. He could still tail a man when he needed to.

But he wasn’t as young as he’d been, not as stealthy as a honed gate-team soldier.

He was about to go buy a beer for perhaps his only friend in the whole world when the two sailors caught him, pinned him against the wall.

“Why are you following me, old man?”

Evan recognized the battle intensity in Mitchell’s eyes. “Can’t an old soldier buy a drink for an old comrade?”

“You know this guy, Cameron?” the shorter sailor asked. “I was never a soldier.”

“I don’t recognize him,” Mitchell said.

“Well,” Evan said, keeping his tone as dry and calm as possible, “it’s been a few years since I was in command of my own gate team. People change.”

“Gate team?” Mitchell echoed. His expression hardened. “Go, Shearborn. I got this.”

Shearborn nodded and backed away. “Holler if you need a hand.”

“Who the hell are you?” Mitchell hissed.

“Colonel Mitchell, it’s me, Major Lorne.”

Mitchell blinked, then squinted at him. “What -?”

“They sent me back to 1910,” Evan said. “I must have failed, if they sent you back too.”

“Failed?”

“My mission. To stop Earth from being destroyed by a fleet of Wraith super-hives.”

Mitchell released Evan, backed up a step. “What year did they send you from?”

“2009.”

“I got sent back from 2008. It was an accident. One of Ba’al’s clones messed with the timeline.” Mitchell scrubbed a hand over his face. “Who else came with you?”

“No one. They sent me here alone, so I’d disturb the timeline as little as possible. You?”

Shadows crossed Mitchell’s face. “None of the others made it.” He inhaled shakily. “How about that drink? I think I’m going to need it.”

Evan nodded. They ordered a couple of beers and sat at a secluded table in a back corner.

“You’ve been alone for thirty years?” Mitchell asked.

Evan shrugged one shoulder. “Now I have you, I guess.” Belatedly, he realized how pathetically desperate that sounded, but he didn’t care. “I was curious, is all. Went to Egypt to watch them dig up the Stargate. Came here to see it arrive. Didn’t expect to see you.”

“This feels like a dream.” Mitchell’s laugh came out half like a sob. “Are you real?”

“Judging by the aching in my old bones, I’d say so.”

Mitchell eyed him. “You’re, what, seventy?”

“That’s pretty old for this era.”

“True.” Again with the shaky laughter. “So, super hives? What happened?”

The entire story came pouring out of Evan, words he hadn’t dared speak aloud in decades, _stargate_ and _Ancient_ and _Wraith_. Mitchell told his story, of the alternate timeline he’d been flung into, Carter a dead astronaut, Jackson losing half his leg, him being his own grandfather paradox, and him being the only one alive to ensure the Stargate’s safe arrival in America.

“So - yeah. The ship’s captain. My grandfather. Vested interest in keeping him alive.”

“I hadn’t thought to look up my family,” Evan admitted. “My grandmother’s probably in Paris now, doing her chef training. They told me to avoid messing up the timeline, to keep to myself.”

Mitchell nodded. “Yeah, that’s been hard. It’s been - lonely. But hey, now we have each other, right? You understand - everything. Not just the Stargate program, but - television. Video games. Fighter jets.” He took a long pull of his beer. “I miss my Mustang.”

Evan reached into his satchel and drew out his precious, precious iPod. “Then you might appreciate this.”

“Is that what I think it is?”

Evan nodded.

Mitchell reached out, didn’t quite touch it.

“It works. I have a solar charger. Headphones busted a while back, but if you’ve got a Victrola or something similar, I can -”

Mitchell scooped it up, cradled it in his hands reverently. “How did you manage this?”

“I’m Major Lorne. I can transport anything anywhere if I put my mind to it.”

“Sheppard used to marvel about your skills all the time,” Mitchell murmured.

Evan reached into his satchel for his sketchbook and opened it, pushed it across the table. “Speaking of Sheppard.”

Mitchell flipped through the pages with trembling hands. When he reached a picture of SG-1, all of them, including O’Neill and Jonas, he actually started to weep.

And Evan couldn’t help it. He wept too.

Then they were both laughing, at themselves and how pathetic they were, and Mitchell flipped through the sketchbook some more, and then they finished their drinks and Mitchell said,

“I know a place that has a Victrola to spare.”

Captain Mitchell obliged both of them, if they wanted to spend the night on the boat with the Victrola. And so they did, hooked the Victrola into the iPod and stayed up all night, singing along to classic rock hits and their guilty pleasures and reveling in not being alone.

Mitchell - who was going by Cameron Jackson - managed to talk Captain Mitchell into taking Evan on despite his age, and like that, Evan had a place. He didn’t have to pretend, and he had people. He had friends. He had family. He didn’t have to hide his soldier ways, and he could draw whenever he wanted. Shearborn and the others said of course Cameron and Evan were friends; look at the strange songs they both knew.

Evan would never see his original home again, but he was content to call the _Achilles_ his new one, till the day he died.

The crew of the _Achilles_ acquitted itself well in the War, and after the War, they sailed to Paris, to look around, to see liberated France.

They took several passengers home with them, a woman from California who had been in Paris attending culinary school before the War broke out.

“Evan,” she said. “That’s a nice name. I’m not sure what I’d do with a son, though. Having all sisters myself, boys are a bit of a mystery.”

He smiled at her and helped her load her luggage into her cabin, and he said, “Maybe you’ll have a grandson.”


End file.
